The ability to diagnose and localize an infection in a subject are critical to the practicing clinician. Current methods to visualize bacterial infection in vivo use positron emission tomography with radiolabeled white blood cells or, more recently, radiolabeled antibiotics. These methods tend to be nonspecific and cannot distinguish infection from inflammation or cancer. For example, Sarda et al. tested 99mTc-labeled ciprofloxacin for imaging S. aureus infection in the knee joints of rabbits. Their results indicated that this compound lacks the specificity necessary for clinical applications ((2002) J. Nucl. Med 43:239-45). In another study, Fishman et al. determined that 18F-labeled fluconazole lacked the specificity to effectively visualize Candida in a rabbit model of infection ((1991) J. Pharmacol. Exp. Ther. 259:1351-9)
Accordingly, the need exists for an organism specific noninvasive imaging method to detect infection, e.g., bacterial, viral or fungal infection in a subject.